Blogging Slate: Go Ahead -- Sleep with Your Kids

How times have changed. Not that long ago, co-sleeping -- which is now seen as unremarkable -- was looked upon with quite the stink eye.

Over a decade ago, Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, wrote about the failure of the "Ferberizing" of his first child and how his wife and he decided they liked sleeping with their child in bed.

In the Slate article, Go Ahead -- Sleep with Your Kids Wright gives one father’s view on the family bed and juxtaposes it with data on both pro and con sides for the family bed.

Wright makes it clear that while to each his own may be true for him, he wished the opposite were true of those with different familial sleeping arrangements. "Lacking data, people like [Richard] Ferber and [T. Berry] Brazelton make creative assertions about what's going on inside the child's head. Ferber says that if you let a toddler sleep between you and your spouse, 'in a sense separating the two of you, he may feel too powerful and become worried.' Well, he may, I guess. Or he may just feel cozy."

Though Wright’s article is 11-years-old, many items still ring true to co-sleeping families but now, co-sleeping families can freely admit they have a family bed and not fear they’ll be looked upon as kooky.